Most digital media solutions are designed for personal rather than social consumption, yet in many situations, people want to share the media consumption experience. Today's solutions for social consumption are mostly located on devices (e.g. Microsoft Media Center Edition on a PC) that typically are not in physical locations in the home conducive to multi-user consumption. Another approach to sharing content is entirely physical, where people literally pass around small devices with screens, such as cell phones. As better solutions emerge to make that content easily available on large screens such as televisions, people will want to share control of the presentation of content without having to take turns using a single device such as a remote control or an attached PC.
People are rapidly adopting network- and media-capable portable devices, but there is no general solution for enabling people with such devices to share control of a presentation of media on a common surface such as a television. In particular, there is a lack of solutions for more advanced requirements like using their personal communication devices (e.g. cellular phones) to browse and select from content that is available in the home media collection or transmitting their own content for inclusion in an ongoing media presentation on a television set in the home.
There has been a lot of existing research about shared screen spaces for social applications and for cooperative work. These activities do not target an in-home situation where a person has a media server that specifically supports multi-user control of a presentation of their personal media collection by a set of participants with personal network-capable devices.
There are also numerous solutions for jukebox-style applications in homes, with Microsoft Media Center Edition Party Mode (MCE) being a good example. MCE does not offer a means of multi-user control beyond individuals taking turns interacting directly with the PC. The control does not extend to personal portable devices like cell phones. Also, such applications do not go beyond jukebox functionality to enable more dynamic interaction with the shared presentation.
In the specific area of using remote devices to control media in the home, there are solutions emerging like having a TiVo Personal Video Recorder (PVR) controlled by a cell phone or consumer electronics devices controlled through a remote connection like SlingMedia's Slingbox®. These solutions are geared toward control of one or more devices by a single user, but not toward common control of a shared media presentation by multiple users.